The Electrical Field (4 page)

“I should put up drapes, shouldn’t I?” was all she said. “Keep our secrets to ourselves, ne?” She clucked her tongue. “Those towers are such ugly things. Does it depress you, Saito-san, to wake up to those each morning? They’re cages, ne?”

Before I could respond, I spotted two figures struggling out to the middle of the field, black heads bobbing amid the waves of grass. “Look. I’ll bring them in for cookies,” I offered, eagerly reaching for my sweater on a nearby chair.

“No, no,” Chisako said quickly, pinching my forearm as if I were a child who’d unknowingly done something to be punished. She grimaced as she released my arm, then her smile returned. “Let them go on. They have their secrets. You remember what it was like at that age.” We watched them as they crossed, Tam’s strides carrying him a little farther with each step, Kimi half running to keep up.

“Look at them,” Chisako said, folding her arms under her breasts. “So chiisai, ne? So insignificant. They must be the shortest in their class.” She did not try to hide the disgust in her voice. She disappeared into my bathroom for several minutes, emerging as her old elegant self, her face evenly powdered. She thanked me many times, and apologized for her outburst. “I’m urusai, I know. Don’t mind me.”

“No, no,” I said, “not urusai, no bother at all. Never.”

At the door she bowed dowdily, avoiding my eyes.

As I recall, the afternoon light fell on Eiji’s portrait in a particular way after Chisako left that day. His smile there, his arm flopped over the armchair in our Port Dover living-room, long ago, before we left Vancouver Island and the sea that he loved. Before everything. He might have just turned sixteen. As I looked into his face, he called to me with his smile. Asa-chan. The sound of my name—no one else ever said it that way, not Mama, not Papa, not Stum. It brought feeling into my heart for Chisako.

I greeted her eagerly on the street the next time I saw her,
anxious to show my sympathy. She was just stepping off the bus. I searched her face for signs of distress. “Chisako, genki?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine, thank you, Saito-san,” she replied brusquely, amid the squawk of the departing bus. Her eyes flitted over my coat, my drab coat that could hardly have been to her taste. “Specials on ika and sashimi downtown,” she said with a cold smile at the ground, adjusting her many shopping bags. “Very fresh today.” She murmured something else too: a hasty goodbye, I thought, but she did not leave. I looked away too, out to the field, to the giants, Chisako’s cages—the electrical towers. How people could have it in their heads to build such hideous things was beyond me; on that afternoon they reminded me of giant ika, standing in the field with their long squid legs. I edged away, nearly bumping into a woman—a big-boned hakujin woman in a kerchief passing at that moment. I recognized her as Keiko Nakamura’s next-door neighbour. “Hello ladies,” she said, her hand with its large knuckles tugging delicately at the kerchief, and we answered in unison, sounding sweet and obedient. She and Chisako exchanged a smile. Chiisai, we’re chiisai, I thought, so small, so insignificant, like Tam and Kimi. I saw my house in the distance, the porch light I’d left on by mistake tunnelling into my eyes in bright daylight. Flashing a message of my loneliness. But Chisako was beautiful, I saw that again, like a newly discovered fact. She was beautiful in anyone’s eyes. A wife, a mother. With bags of groceries for her family. “Saito-san,” she started to say, but by then I’d moved away, to cross the field for home, and even as I saw she was hurt it was too late. I called out something about getting back to Papa. Getting back
because I could not endure myself in her presence for one second longer.

“Ne-san!” It was Stum, staring at me, concerned. In his little-boy moments that was what I was, his ne-san, his older sister. But I saw myself in his eyes, slumped back on the chesterfield, looking lost.

“Nani?”

“It’s Papa. Something’s wrong.” I listened but it was unusually quiet, no whine or hum from upstairs. When I stood up, my knee buckled, still asleep.

“What happened?” I followed Stum up the stairs.

“He made a funny noise, and then …” His untucked shirt-tail flapped at the back, his belt slapped his thigh as we hurriedly climbed and his muffled voice fell back in my ears. I crossed the hall into Papa’s room, pushed myself past the doorway. I closed and opened my eyes once to feel something that fit together. The room was silent, the air sucked right out. He lay still, too still, his head back farther than usual. His lips and eyes were clenched shut, but saliva shone all around his mouth, puddling on his pillow, more than usual. I heard the toilet flush and Stum came up behind me, leaning over my shoulder.

“I was on the benjo when I heard it,” he whispered shakily. “He’s leaking.” He pointed at Papa’s lips as if that were the sign, instead of the fact that he wasn’t breathing.

I stood there, watching, waiting for the slightest rise in his chest. “Do something,” Stum hissed in my ear.

Slowly, I leaned down and listened. Holding my own breath. I did not touch him. Seconds passed. Do something,
I told myself. I felt Stum pinch my elbow, hard; I’d have a bruise by morning. I reached down to Papa’s neck, what I’d seen the nurses do. His lips were more purple than ever, and gummy. I would not, could not press my lips to those, even to save him.

“Ne-san, do something!” Stum repeated, only louder. He put his hand on my back to push me down closer. As he did, Papa’s eyes flickered open and a whistle of air streamed from between those lips onto my cheek, and saliva bubbled up. It smelled sour, as sour as Eiji’s had been sweet, up until the very last moment.

A whole day passed without word or trace of them. Late that night I finally fell into a deep sleep, but in the morning, watching Stum pull out of the driveway, I was suddenly tired. I’d managed to keep everyone from my thoughts except Sachi. It was all I could do. I tried to let each moment sit, then move on, tick tick tick. But each hour brought me closer to the possibility of what Stum had said being true: they were gone, every one of them. Then the tick tick grew fierce.

Today was Saturday. The field was quiet. The Nakamuras’ front drapes remained closed. She was in there, shut inside her room. I worried about her alone, trapped there, her nerves squeezed tight. I wondered if she might hurt herself. I had no faith in Keiko or Tom to prevent it, much less help her. I knew the way they were with her, she didn’t have to tell me. They’d come home to her tired, with no patience, no understanding to coax her still, no words.

The window of the Yano house gaped wide as ever, as if its occupants had been evicted. A police car was parked
in front but there were no signs of anyone around or inside the house.

I went out back to the garden to look at my peonies. They were all blooming at once now, so many of them, on both sides of the yard. My climbing pink roses were budding, and my irises were rising stark and rich. But the sight made me a little sick at heart, all the lush pink and purple and pure white coming up around me, because in no time they’d be brown and curling, ruined. As I cut a few stems, I imagined Sachi beside me, wincing with each snip of my scissors and letting of sap, like the first time she’d visited. I brought the flowers inside and the smell in the house seemed to sweeten at once, in spite of Papa.

It was around this time of year when Sachi and I had our first visit together. She was much smaller then, only nine or ten. Truly a child. A hot spell had tricked my hybrid tea-roses into early bloom; the nights were still cold. I’d brought out my tall glass bottles and covered the blossoms close to the ground, gently bending their heads as a protection against the night frost that would surely come. I was considering plastic wrap for the taller buds when I noticed one or two broken off, the stems oozing their fluid thicker than dew. I touched the stickiness and brought it to my mouth, as if to stop the flow of blood from a finger cut. It tasted bitter instead of sweet.

By the fence at the far end of the yard, I spied the gaudy yellow and red stripes of a candy-bar wrapper in the grass. I was reaching to thread my arm under the slats and grasp the wrapper between my fingers when I heard a rustle, and breath sipped up, little by little. Instinctively I glanced up at
Papa’s window, where, on good days in the past, he sometimes struggled to sit, but he wasn’t there. It was then I found her with me in my garden, twisting the flower off one of my hybrid teas with her stubby little hands. There were two more by her feet, the pink heads already wilting. “Stop that!” I snapped. I was furious but instantly felt sheepish; she was just a child, I told myself, she didn’t know any better. She let my rose droop on its half-broken stalk and stood up. She held her hands behind her, as if offering herself prisoner. On the pale yellow blouse she wore, I noticed two round shadows where her breasts were starting, like spreading stains. I was more than a smidgen taller than her, but I could tell from her long neck, thin as my rose stems, that she would grow.

We knew each other. We’d been seeing one another for years now on opposite sides of the field. I’d seen her with her mother, a short woman with thick, muscular calves and dark skin. I’d see Keiko tug Sachi along on the street, gripping tight as she struggled to break free. The child fixed on me as I took my morning walk through the field, among the electrical towers that Keiko warned her away from. Wondering what I was to her.

I took Keiko Nakamura for Okinawan because of her swarthy complexion, which stayed through winter. She was like me, nisei, that was obvious. Perhaps it was that look of toughness, being the second generation in Canada but the first born here, I don’t know. The wind first carried her name to me when the husband, Tom, called from his car in the driveway, half getting out:
Keiko, nan-to you wa
, complaining about something she hadn’t done his way as she stood holding the
screen door half open in the morning.
Kay, come on in for a coffee sometime, won’t you?
from that big-knuckled woman next door. Neither Tom nor Keiko knew what to do with the child, unruly, wilful child, I saw that; even I knew better.

“So?” I said to Sachi as she stood in my garden that day. I didn’t know how I meant the word, in English or in Japanese, or if she understood it could mean something in both. She stared, then thrust out her arms and her hands holding my broken blossoms.

“Sorry,” she blurted, not sounding sorry at all. Like a rebellious child being told to give her teacher flowers, though they were from my own garden. “Miss Saito,” she added, knowing I’d be surprised, even flattered she knew my name. As I took the flower-tops from her I noticed small cuts on the backs of her hands. They were too long to be pricks from thorns; some were fresh. I winced. It had started back then, the small tortures in the kitchen at night while her parents slept.

“Itai? Does it hurt?” I asked, eyeing her hands.

She shook her head. She was still clutching one flower that had stayed furled tight, an eye shut against the light. “They were gonna die anyway,” she declared. “When the cold comes back at night.” Without blinking, watching me with each word: “Then they shrivel into old babies.”

Inside she sat on the chesterfield as I dabbed iodine on her cuts. She didn’t flinch. After a moment she sat up. “What’s that?” It took me a moment to realize she meant Papa. It was the low buzz I carried in my head all day, even when I left the house. Even in my sleep. I barely thought twice.

“Nothing,” I said. After a moment I added: “Just the fan upstairs.” She paused, listening closely, glanced at me, then kicked her legs against the couch.

“There. No need for bandages,” I said. “Let the air heal them. That’s the best thing.” I tightened the cap on the iodine bottle and pushed it aside. She slipped her hands out of mine and sat forward, knowing I was going to ask her about the cuts, how she got them. The flower heads lay in a pile on the coffee table in front of us.

“Does it hurt them?”

“What? Oh, no,” I assured her. She was staring at the short stems, ragged at their ends. She eased herself away from me as if I were something she’d broken off too.

“Well, maybe a little,” I said, watching her mouth wilt at the corners. Her lips naturally drooped into a frown. “But no more than when they’re cut in full bloom,” I added, conscious of my own meagre smile.

Sachi pointed to where the stems had leaked their bitter fluid onto the coffee table. “Look,” she said, and her voice quivered. “They’re bleeding.”

I laughed.

“My mom says they bleed to death when I pick them,” she said. A cruel thing to tell a child, I thought, just to keep a garden. She lowered her head and stared into her lap, where her hands figheted. Without thinking, I reached out and held one in mine. Her small fingers were stiff; they wouldn’t collapse inside my clammy palm. I wanted to say, they’re only plants; not flesh and blood, like you. I wanted to pinch her and hold her. I yearned for it. This was different from when Stum was a child. Holding him, my own body young yet, I
didn’t wonder then how it felt to be a mother, to have someone grow inside you.

I’d held on too long. Sachi pulled away gently. I drew back, my hand hanging cold.

“That’s why I picked your flowers instead of my mom’s,” she blurted with a mean smile. She could change in an instant; be almost pretty, then brutally plain. She bounded to the foot of the stairs, put one foot on the first step, glanced back at me with my pounding heart. “The fan sounds tired,” she whispered, blowing on her finger.

I tried to draw her back to me, bringing out my ikebana things from the dining-room cabinet, clattering the porcelain vase onto the coffee table to drown out the whine from upstairs, but she stayed put. She watched me trim and stab the short rose stems into the kenzan. Hesitantly she made her way over. “Earth, moon, stars,” I said, and I hastily held a cluster of leaves this way and that under the flowers. “My mom says it’s heaven, earth, and man,” she said, and I felt the heat in my cheeks telling me I’d got it wrong. Then she leaned in close to the three roses and moved her lips slightly, whispering again. “They’re dead now,” she said. Then, after another moment, asked, “Can I go now, Miss Saito?”